by Jeffrey Lent
The stationmaster took Norman’s money and passed the ticket back through the grille. A small man with a fierce weave of white eyebrow that knotted over the bridge of his nose. He cleared his throat. To Norman the sound of a man spending too long indoors. He spoke. “Now Missus Pelham. This is coach to New York. There you have a sleeper to Goldsboro North Carolina. There you have coach through Raleigh to Sweetboro North Carolina.”
Leah spoke. “Yes.”
The man reached his left arm to drive up the garter on his right sleeve. “In Virginia you may lose the sleeper and have to ride coach the rest of the way.”
“But I have a sleeper ticket all the way through.”
“That’s correct. You do.”
“So why would I lose it?”
“I can’t say you will. That’ll depend on the train. How busy it is. Even I guess who’s working on it tonight.”
“I don’t understand this. I have a sleeper ticket. A Pullman berth.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“And you’re telling me that in Virginia that may change.”
“It may. May not.”
“I see.” She was quiet a moment and then said, “But this ticket, it’s the same railroad. Isn’t that right?”
Sometime during this conversation he tipped his head down to fill out forms. Now he raised it again. His face was streaked, purple and reds blotched high against his skin. “State by state,” he said. “It’s the same company. State by state. All I meant was to tell you that. Do you understand?”
“Oh,” she said, “I do. I do.”
“Probably,” he said, “it’ll be fine. Just the odd case; I didn’t want you to be surprised.”
“All I’m trying to do is go home.”
“Yes ma’am. And I wish you the best with that. Me. I’m Randolph born and bred and to speak the truth, I been trying to do the same since I was about thirty-five years old. So I wish you the best, ma’am.”
Leah took a step back from the counter. She had the ticket in her hand. Back, she said, “Thank you. I appreciate it.”
“I just wanted you to know. And anyhow, you’ll get there.”
“Oh,” she said, “I know that.”
She stepped back again and turned and took Norman’s arm and they went out the other doors onto the platform and she kissed him and mounted the train and he stood watching as she made her way down through two cars and found a seat by the window and sat without looking at him. Her face was taut and he felt the fear in her he’d been avoiding in himself and he stood there, watching her as the other passengers boarded, and still she did not look out at him. Then he watched the train pull away, watched her pull away. For a very short time he could see her and then could not. She was gone. Gone off within steel and coal into the depth of America. Gone off away from him and far back into herself, gone into the American South, that place to him of blood and gore, bones, all now gone to dust he guessed. He could see no pleasure in farming a crop out of ground fertilized so. Down the valley the whistle sobbed as the train went through Bethel. It was raining. He went out of the station and drove his team home.
Late Friday afternoon of the same week: Norman and Prudence had spent the day shoveling wagonloads of litter and manure from the henhouses and spreading it over the cropped-back hayfields and, finished with that, were lounging outside the main haymow open door, sitting on upturned egg crates, their clothes layered with the fine pale dust of the henhouse, their boots gummed with droppings. On the hillside above the house Abby and Jamie were digging potatoes, a small basket just for supper, but even at the distance Norman saw them turning it into a game, a keep-away with the girl leaning forward, her arms spread wide to try and capture the boy holding the potato high as a trophy, the boy dancing back and forth in the potato ground as she advanced on him, a stooped spread-legged ogress, swaying at the waist to reach for him, her face low and jutted forward. Shrieks came down the hill.
Norman took his pipe from his vest pocket, stirred up the bowl with the blade of his pocketknife and clamped the stem with his teeth. From the same pocket he drew out a match and leaned to strike it on the granite foundation wall behind him, his free hand up to cup the flame: a habit even with the air settled, motionless. His cheeks bulbed and loosed jets of smoke into the yard where they hung and fell apart. As of Wednesday morning, when her train schedule had her in Sweetboro, he’d lost track of her. For twenty-five years he’d known always where she was. It was as if a part of him were flayed away. The children felt this also, each to their varying degrees of understanding. The need of her. He sat smoking. There was a rage in him, held in place by the three children and by his own ineffectual ideas of where it belonged. It was general, directed everywhere but at no one thing and so finally nowhere but himself; he was a man helpless to everything beyond the simple containment of himself before his children. As if his directionless anger were a pustule buried under his skin, running the length of him. He held the pipe in the cup between thumb and first finger, the digits splayed back along the shank of the briar, the bowl hot against his callus. The smoke went off into the afternoon.
Father and daughter sat watching the two on the hillside. Norman did not know if it was the pellucid air or his worked muscles relaxing or even the bowl of tobacco but it seemed to him that the boy’s cries grew and his movement over the potato ground increased—antic, agitated—even as his sister’s approach of him became more grotesque, exaggerated, her torso now almost parallel to the ground above her spread legs, her arms groping, her face protruding, straggled with hair.
“She keeps that up, he’ll pee his pants.” Pru had a piece of split shingle from the barn siding and was scraping chicken shit off her boots, slowly peeling the smeared droppings away, her leg lifted and crossed at the calf over the opposite knee. One eye to the job, the other to the siblings. “That’s a little feller delights himself with terror.”
“Most little chaps do.”
“Unh.” Not committing herself. Then said, “Big ones too, seems to me.” Cutting her eyes at her father.
“No,” said Norman. “It’s not so much habit as what gets hurled your way.”
“Me, now, I think she’s trying to impress on him how fearful women can be.”
“That right?”
“Yuht.”
“Boys don’t ever believe that.”
She grinned at him. “Have to learn the hard way, huh?”
“Why sure. Old lady nature wouldn’t stand for it any other way.”
“It sometimes strikes me as pretty pointless.”
“That’s just because you think about it, that’s all.”
“And sister?” She gestured up the hill. “You believe she doesn’t think about it?”
“I believe”—he pulled on his pipe—“Abby is prepared to wrestle life right down to the ground and pin it there if she can.”
“And me? What do you make of me?”
“Why like I said. You think about it. You ride that river, now and again notice the bank slipping by.”
“You think that? You think it’s wrong?”
“Oh Lord, don’t ask me about the rights and wrongs. Everybody’s got their own way they have to live and not really so much choice in it as they sometimes like to think. That’s about it, for me.”
“I pity the man she marries.”
“Abby?” He spat in the drying dooryard. “She’ll make a fine wife.”
“Oh, she’ll make a fine wife, no doubt. I just wouldn’t want to be the husband is all. I expect any man’s just going to get in the way of her doing her job of wifing, that’s what I think.”
“Careful now,” Norman said. “Times we end up getting for ourselves what we think of others.”
“You’re pretty worried about her, aren’t you?”
He looked at her. “No. She’ll get over that boy just fine.”
“I’m talking about Mother.”
He tamped the pipe bowl down with his thumb and put the pipe in his vest pocket. “Not
so much. She’s capable.” He paused and added, “I fret not knowing where she is moment to moment but that speaks more of me than her. But your mother, I’ve not seen her faced with a situation she hadn’t already figured out.” And knew he was lying but could not think why just then. He said, “She’ll be fine. She’s fine.”
Pru was not looking at him but nodding her head, which he knew meant she’d heard at least the hesitation if not the lie itself. After a moment she said, “What’s it like, that country?”
“Where she’s from?”
“North Carolina, yes.”
“Can’t say. You know I spent the war in Virginia and only met her as she was coming north. Virginia now, that was freezing mud in the wintertime and hot summers like wearing a boiled blanket. Other than that, what you could see beyond the war was pretty enough I guess. But I wasn’t sightseeing and the local folks you must recall were doing their best to kill me. So I might not have the best impression of the place. There was times though, little gaps in it all, where I could see it was a fine place. I recall thinking, Why, bring in a batch of Green Mountain boys used to plowing granite and hoeing gravel and turn them loose on this and their sheer wonder at the ease of the soil would’ve ended the whole shebang. A fertile place. But then perhaps that’s half the problem. The easier things are the more people just want, want without thinking; gratitude it seems only comes from wrestling something good from something hard.”
“Sure. Like the way Abby just takes her looks for granted.”
“Well, they were granted. She did nothing to get them. She’s not to be envied. She knows that and I thought you did too.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not hard.”
“Yuht. For now. But time’s just an old idiot locked away in a closet when you’re young. But the rascal doesn’t stay there, I promise you that.”
“I hate that you’ll-understand-all-this-years-from-now talk.”
“I know it. But that’s just the thing. You will.”
They were quiet then. The figures up the hill had gone back to work, the small boy beside the young woman, who bent as she pressed the fork into the ground with the arch of her foot and turned it up with a studded clod, the boy’s arms darting to pluck up the food. Then Pru turned on her egg crate so her body was front to her father and reached a forefinger and laid it upon his temple. She said, “Showing all that wisdom, right there those silver hairs.”
He turned to her touch. “Well, you noticed. I thought they added a nice touch, myself.”
She nodded. “It suits you. Me, what I hope for is to get old. With white hair and wrinkles I won’t no longer care. That’s when I figure I’ll be all me. Able to relax and stop chasing myself around. The same time, my plan’s to stay just the way I am. I can’t imagine feeling any different about things. You don’t fool me, I know you worry over me. For no good reason I see. Maybe I do ride the river but I know I’m by Jesus in it.”
He nodded. “That’s as reasonable plan’s I’ve heard.”
She grinned again. “I think of it more as an experiment.”
“Maybe you should take notes.”
Her eyebrows folded up upon themselves and she studied the ground before her a moment, then looked at him. “Actually I do. Every night I write down what happened that day, maybe a little of how I felt about it. So it’s there.”
“Do you?”
“Uh-huh.”
Now over the western ridge was a single high anvil of cumulus, blown there by winds far beyond their knowing, the edges of the cloud scalloped black with the body swollen like a dozen lumped breasts. He said, “Times, I wish I’d done that. Wrote things down. But then I wonder if the words would get in the way of the memory, replace the memory. But of course memory’s nothing but what some part of you chooses. The problem with you and me, people like us, is we want to hold on to it all. We can’t let none of it go. But it goes on and goes, all the same.”
She was quiet and then said, “Oh. You’re a melancholy man today.”
He waited also but less time than she had and he said, “I’ve always been that way.”
“I think it’s a terrible way to be.”
“I guess maybe so. But it’s the only way I know.”
They were sitting to supper in that same evening dusk turned cool when the muted polyphony of wheels and hooves came clear as a vehicle crested the hill into the farm. Norman heard it first and stood to the window and then the boy was beside him, grasping the window ledge to bounce up and down as his father peered down at the hotel livery approaching, struck still with the apparition of some news, a telegram, something vivid, worse than he could know. So he could not see what was simply there. Behind him he felt the weight of the girls at the table watching him, both held torpid with their own sense of disaster. Only Jamie was free then to cry out, “It’s Mama. Mama’s back!”
She would not speak of her trip and stopped the clamor with firmness. “I’m back; that’s all. Don’t pester me.” She sat to eat a small plate of the fresh potatoes and a single slice of cob-smoked ham and Norman saw she was near trembling, each motion slightly adrift with tremor. She would not meet his eyes but once, this a chilled beseeching for solitude. She watched her plate, working knife and fork constantly to carve and maneuver the food into slight portions that from time to time she’d lift to her mouth. She told nothing and asked no questions and the room fell silent around her it seemed without her noticing but as if the silence extended out from her. Only at the end of the meal did she take the small boy briefly between her knees to press him against her and stroke his head and then her hands fell easily off him when Abby came forward to take him up for his story and bed. Prudence began to wash up after the meal and Norman rose from the table as was his custom, going to the parlor to smoke, and, standing, looked to Leah, expecting she would rise also. She sat at the table, her eyes still on the cloth before her, her hands lying on their sides on the table, thumbs and fingers forming crude cups, as if dropped there. He stood looking down at her. Her clothes were smeared with dust, ill-fitting with travel, slumped upon her. She did not look up at him. At the sink, Pru worked quickly, very quietly, her back straight with tension. She washed and rinsed and left all in the drainboard, not drying with a cloth to place things away in the cupboards and drawers but left them to air dry and rinsed her hands under the gravity line and left the room, her eyes scanning her mother and father both in one swift roll. Norman stood a moment more, the sound of the door closing a stubborn sigh in the kitchen, as if the air there were inhaled and held. Then he sat at the table again, took out pipe and pouch, filled the briar and smoked. Waited.
She sat without moving, not watching her hands on the table before her but some space well beyond them or far closer, he could not tell which. After a time she sighed, nothing more than breath gone out of her but he felt it as a vibration, a rippling out of not just her lungs but the muscles and fibers of her body, the sound more a gathering of herself than relaxation. She stood and lifted her valise from the floor and placed it on the table, undoing the clasps so it spread, a squat hourglass animal. She went then to the sink and with her back turned to him stripped to the waist, letting her clothes fall, the heap ragged and stiff with travel. She washed herself with a coarse cloth meant for scouring pots, spending great time on her face and hands before abrading her upper body. Then still avoiding his eyes she dug into the valise and brought out a cotton nightgown and pulled it over her head. She reached under it and dropped her skirts and underclothes and lifted the nightgown to bunch with a rude knot about her waist. Used the same cloth to wash herself below, a furious scrubbing, finally lifting each foot to place on the grillwork edge of the range to wash it, thrusting the cloth between the toes and working it back and forth as if to clean away the ground covered, the miles traveled. Norman watched at first and then averted his eyes but still watched, not sure if this private act displayed before him was confidence or indifference. When she was done she loosened the knot and her gown fell around h
er. Then she bent to gather the fine rumpled sour suit and without ceremony pressed it hard down into the valise, snapping shut the clasps to cover it all. As if it were gone from her. Then she looked at him, her eyes wide, flickering, not steady. He saw them filled with troubling, with fear. He didn’t believe this to be directed at him but knew no other target. The eyes reminded him of a young horse, raised wild without human touch, now confined, smelling the upright creature approaching.
He said, “You got that over with quick.” Overhead there were footsteps, murmured voices, then quiet. The supper split-wood settled in the stove firebox. He could hear Leah breathing, little rags of phlegm in her throat.
“There wasn’t nothing.” Her voice rough, as if her throat were scarred or skinned over, as if bark grew there.
“Nothing of your mother? No word, nobody knowing anything?”
She shook her head. Again, her voice quivering, a spent arrow shaft, she said, “There wasn’t nothing.”
Confused as much by her as her words, he said, “What do you mean, nothing? No town? No people there at all?”
“No, no,” she cried. “Just there wasn’t nothing.”
“Leah.” His voice opening out around her name.
“What do you want of me!”
He sat back in the chair, turned his feet out from the table and crossed one knee over the other, his sock-foot dangling. Again he thought of the wild horse, the way when touched the muscle under the hide would ripple, the sensation of being able to touch fear. He said, “Why, nothing. I can see you’re wore down. You don’t have to tell me about it. Not now, not anytime, you don’t care to. I’m glad you’re back is all. Safe and sound.”
“I don’t know,” she said, “why you should be.”
She slept thirty hours and the rest tiptoed as if the house held sickness. At half past four Sunday morning she rose and dressed in the near-dark. Norman woke also and lay silent watching her, a dim figure against the predawn panes. It was cold in the room and he thought Frost on the Hubbards to sweeten the meat. If there’d been lamplight he’d have seen his breath. He lay watching her assemble clothing from out of drawers and draw it on and this familiar everyday reassured him. He considered speaking to her but something in the way she stood before the window made him not: nothing so clear as an attempt on her part for stealth but more complicated, as if she drew clothing onto her with a focused distraction he felt more than saw. He lay in the bed not as if sleeping, knowing not to hope to fool her, but as if sleep lay still heavy over him. Once she was gone from the room he listened to her tread in the hall and on the stairs and then rolled onto his back, fully awake. He heard her in the kitchen, could smell woodsmoke as the range came up to life and sometime after that began to feel the creep of warmth. Then, as the panes boldened to stippled dawn and he was just short of rising, heard the backdoor clap lightly shut, the sound of a held-back door eased to. He guessed she was out to the barns and stood then from the bed, feeling all was well, was sliding back to old ways and counts and he dressed simply in wool trousers with a checked shirt drawn down into them, his braces snug and tight over his shoulders as if affirming the rightness and roundness of the world.